The Evolution of My Amazon FBA Business Over 8+ Years

In this post, I’m sharing details about my own Amazon FBA journey.  While I have a short introduction to my journey on my About page, I want to share a deeper view into my experience with FBA, and show how my business has evolved since I started in 2015.

I’m going to break this post into sections by year, since I keep track of everything having to do with my business in one-year increments, and also because it will show how my business has progressed from one year to the next.  I’ve researched my past sales data, purchasing records, and generally all the documentation I keep, in order to tell the story of how far I’ve come.

My goal in sharing is to show how ambition, focus, and determination can lead to success, which hopefully motivates you to pursue your own idea, project, or whatever you’re working on in your life today.

2015: The Year I Started

My FBA journey started in January of 2015, unfortunately borne out of frustration and disappointment.  I had been unhappy working a full-time job for several years prior to 2015, and I had finally had enough.

As a kid in high school, I was fed the same story I think a lot of people are, which goes something like this:  go to college, get a “good paying” job, and everything will turn out great.

Well, everything wasn’t great for me.  I worked at a job that was stressful, low-paying, and took well over 40 hours a week of my time. The worst part was, everyone else working with me seemed okay with the situation.  Well, I was definitely not okay with working a high stress/low paying/time-consuming job for decades to come, so I started researching alternative ways to earn income. In short, I was on a quest for freedom.

In researching alternative ways to earn money, I had read some blog posts about people selling things on Amazon, and it piqued my interest.  This seemed like something I could do, and more importantly, something I could do in my spare time.

My expectations were very low, and I didn’t think anything would come of it.  However, since the first items I was selling were books that were just lying around the house, I had nothing to lose other than a couple of hours of my time.  I created a seller account, listed the books for sale, and sent to them to Amazon.

Much to my surprise, the books all sold within a couple of weeks. The best part was that I made a couple of hundred dollars selling them!  This was a much better result than I was expecting, since I didn’t think I would make any money at all.

Now that I had seen how easy it was to sell books on Amazon, I started looking around for books from anywhere I could find them. I visited thrift shops, Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and started going to library book sales on the weekend.  I also started visiting retail stores and searching through clearance aisles for products that I could resell, since I knew you could sell more than just books on Amazon

In hindsight, the most important thing I discovered was one type of store that turned out to be an especially profitable retail arbitrage source for me: the liquidation/salvage store. I wrote about sourcing at this type of store in this post, but it’s worth mentioning again, because of how profitable it would become for me. Over the years, I spent several hundred thousand dollars at this particular store on product to resell, and I made close to that much in profit as well.

One thing that I hadn’t expected was how many miles I would drive doing retail arbitrage.  I was shopping almost every weekend, and sometimes visiting multiple stores in the same weekend. According to my records, I traveled over 4,200 miles going from store to store in 2015!  

I also discovered the peculiar subculture of Amazon resellers who frequent library book sales that you can read about here. You can spot these people because they use a PDA (rather than a smart phone) to scan books, and they scan them as fast as they possibly can, because there are usually competing sellers also scanning books as fast as they can. I was fairly fast at scanning books with my smart phone, but I could never keep up with these people. Fortunately for me, I found much more profitable products to resell at the liquidation/salvage stores, so library book sales never became a major source of inventory for me.

With all the shipments I was sending to Amazon, I started making regular trips to UPS stores near me. I would eventually become a regular at four different stores in my area.

Dropping off Amazon shipments at UPS stores was a time-consuming task, but one that had to be done. I was still a couple of years away from the UPS driver visiting my house for daily pickups.

I eventually started creating so many shipments to send to Amazon, that I bought some basic equipment to make the job easier. I bought a new computer, a handheld barcode scanner, several Scotty peelers, and a proper shipping scale. I would learn to appreciate the value of time-saving tools a little bit more every year.

My biggest mistake of 2015 was not keeping detailed purchasing records. Part of this was due to the experimental nature of my selling on Amazon, and part was a complete lack of knowledge about how keeping records would be of value to me in the future.  While I did keep receipts, I didn’t pay close attention to the exact items that I bought.  If you don’t know what you are buying, how can you know how successful a given product is?  I wasn’t thinking about any of this as I started selling on Amazon.  If there was one thing I could do differently in 2015, it would be to have kept better records of what I purchased.

This also taught me a valuable lesson about business in general: you will make mistakes, and the best you can do is to learn from them and not repeat the same mistakes in the future.

By the end of 2015, I had over $34,000 in sales on Amazon. At the time, this felt like an extraordinary achievement. If you had asked me in January of that year if I thought it was realistic to sell $34,000 worth of stuff on Amazon, I would’ve laughed at you and told you that was completely ludicrous!  I never knew there was this kind of potential in online retail, and I felt that my experiment in Amazon FBA was successful. So successful, in fact, that I would commit as much time as possible to selling on Amazon the next year.

2015 Product Success Highlights:

2015 Inventory Source Breakdown:

Retail Arbitrage	Wholesale	Private Label
100%	0%	0%

2016: The Year I Got Serious, or, The Year of Maximum Retail Arbitrage

I started 2016 with one thought: I was going to push this “experiment” of mine as hard as I could, to see just how far I could take it.  The amount of time I spent traveling, sourcing, shipping, and selling increased dramatically from 2015.  It’s not an overstatement to say most of my non-working time in 2016 was spent in some activity related to selling on Amazon.  This was a gamble for me at the time, but the alternative of spending the rest of my life as an overworked, underpaid, stressed out employee, was unacceptable.  I know now that this level of focus and determination I brought to my business would be the recurring theme of my success for the next several years.

One of the first changes I made in 2016 was to start keeping a proper line-item record of every purchase I made. This was the first step I made toward “formalizing” my business, and it was a valuable one. Now I had a record of what was successful and what was not from each sourcing location, so I could tell what my best products and best sourcing spots were!

Also, looking back to my records from 2016, I drove over 8,000 miles to source products to sell!  I was shopping nearly every weekend, and sometimes after work on weekdays as well, trying to buy anything I could to resell.  I was really committing to this, and looking back I can remember many of the trips and just how time consuming they were.

I also reinvested nearly all the profits from my sales into purchasing more inventory.  This was very important, because I wanted to see how much I could grow if invested everything back into the business. 

Another first for me in 2016 was to buy products through wholesale distributors.  This was a big step, because I discovered the potential of buying in quantities that weren’t limited to what was available on store shelves. 

By the end of the year, I had purchased from 3 different wholesale distributors, although it only amounted to a couple thousand dollars-worth of product.  It was an eye-opener and a great learning experience for me.  I also still buy from one of those sources today, and in far greater quantities than in 2016, so experimenting with wholesale purchasing was a great investment in my business’s future.

Another thing I saw in 2016 was that my overall profit margin per sale shrank as my total sales volume grew.  I’ve since learned that this is generally what happens as a business grows, and I continue to experience this today as I keep growing my sales.  The positive side to this is that the increased sales volume more than makes up for the slimmer margins.

At the close of 2016, my sales exceeded $138,000, which was over 4 times what my sales were in 2015!  I remember thinking how amazing it was that I cleared the $100k threshold, and I also remember wondering how much further I could keep growing my business.  As 2017 would show, the answer was A LOT.

2016 Product Success Highlights:

2016 Stats:

2016 Inventory Source Breakdown:

Retail Arbitrage	Wholesale	Private Label
93%	7%	0%

2017: The Year Wholesale Took Over

2017 was a year of transition for my Amazon business.  While I still did a lot of retail arbitrage sourcing, I greatly expanded my wholesale buying, both in number of distributors with whom I did business, and the amount I spent per order.

As the year progressed, the number of wholesale sources I purchased from increased to over 20; most importantly, I still buy from nearly all of these sources today.  Another interesting thing to note is that I discovered some of these sources by purchasing their products in retail stores, and then deciding to contact them to see if they would sell directly to me.  In several cases, my initiative paid off, and they agreed to do business with me.  This bottom-up approach to product sourcing has continued to work well for me, and it’s definitely helped me grow my business in ways I couldn’t have achieved through Google-searches for “wholesale suppliers” or something similar.

By far the most interesting thing I learned in 2017 was that if I continued to apply myself, I knew I could grow my business to a point where I could quit my job and sell on Amazon to make my living.  I can’t overstate how powerful of a motivator this was for me.  Part of what got me started with Amazon FBA in the first place was how unsatisfied I was with working a regular day-job, and how I wanted to find a different path for myself.  To finally know that I could replace my job with my own business was immensely gratifying, if somewhat bittersweet, because I knew I still had a ways to go.

I learned a few other interesting things in 2017 as well.  As a result of spending 2+ years (and hundreds of hours) in stores scanning products using my phone and the Amazon Seller app, I could spot products that might sell well on Amazon just by looking at them.  I would still scan them anyway, just to confirm my suspicion, but I was often right about their prospects without even needing to scan them.

I believe one of the biggest advantages I have over other sellers is the education I received through scanning thousands of items to see if they will sell on Amazon or not.  You can’t learn what I did by watching a YouTube guru or paying for an Amazon selling course.  That’s like reading the Cliff-Notes version of a book; it’s just not as thorough, immersive, or ultimately as valuable as the experience I gained through scanning as many products as I did.

I also learned that I needed to continue to find ways to save time, so I decided that 2017 would be my final year of taking shipments to UPS stores myself.  I was making these trips almost daily, and it was interfering with my ability to get to my job on-time, not to mention it was getting really old loading and unloading boxes from my truck that I had already packed at home.  Deciding to have UPS come to me was one of the biggest time-saving steps I took.  In hindsight, it was silly how long I kept driving shipments to UPS myself, but sometimes you don’t know how much a change will benefit you until you do it.

By the end of 2017, my sales more than doubled from 2016, and more importantly, I could almost taste the sweet freedom of quitting my job for good.  I resolved to continue to push myself, so that 2018 would be the year I had been dreaming of for so long.

2017 Product Success Highlights:

2017 Stats:

2017 Inventory Source Breakdown:

Retail Arbitrage	Wholesale	Private Label
25%	75%	0%

2018: The Year I Quit My Job

2018 was by far the most important year of my Amazon FBA journey so far.  First, I continued to grow and formalize my business to make it ready to stand on its own.  Secondly, and more importantly, it was the year I quit my full-time job.

I started 2018 establishing an LLC for my business.  For anyone who has a business that grows beyond a hobby, it’s something I recommend doing.  An LLC makes your business a separate entity from you the owner, which means you can’t be held personally responsible for business debts and/or liabilities.  I did this after discussing it with my accountant, and I also recommend getting professional advice in these types situations as your business grows.  The cost for this advice will more than pay for itself over time, so it’s worth it.

Another interesting first in 2018 was that I attended my first trade show. It was a small show, and I already knew several of the participants because of the wholesale contacts I had made over the years, but it was a valuable experience. I met some new contacts that I still do business with today, and it showed me another way to meet new people in the same business as myself.

As for quitting my job, I knew I was getting close when I took a vacation in July.  My sales were on pace to more than double from 2017, so the business was finally generating enough profit to replace the income from my job.

Late in September, I met with my boss and told him how I had a growing Amazon business, and that I was giving my 2 week notice.  He congratulated me, and admitted being a bit envious, as he had thought about doing something similar in the past, but never followed through with it.  It was surprising to hear him say that, but I think a lot of people have ambitions they unfortunately don’t follow through with. 

Quitting my job was one of the most exciting, but scary, events of my life!  I had worked there for 11 years, and it felt like I was leaving safety and security behind for the unknown.  What I didn’t know then, but know now, was this: by choosing to focus on my business, I was actually growing my safety and security.  It allowed me the time and freedom to take my business to the next stage of its development, so leaving my job turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life!

By the close of 2018, my sales were greater than my total sales for 2015, 2016, and 2017 combined!  It was an impactful year for my business, but especially for me personally, because quitting my job gave me the time to set my sights on my primary goal for 2019: hitting the $1,000,000 sales mark!

2018 Product Success Highlights:

2018 Stats:

2018 Inventory Source Breakdown:

Retail Arbitrage	Wholesale	Private Label
1%	99%	0%

2019: The Year I Started Selling My Own Products

I started 2019 knowing I wanted to try to reach $1,000,000 in sales by the end of the year, so I made a few changes that helped me reach that goal.

First, now that I no longer had a job, I could spend more time on the physical and logistical aspects of selling on Amazon.  For me, this specifically meant I could spend more time receiving, sorting, and sending inventory to Amazon’s warehouses.  Due to this additional time I had, I increased the size of my wholesale orders, which were regularly exceeding $10,000 for a single order, so I could concentrate on getting as much product to Amazon as possible.

Being able to focus 100% on Amazon was transformational for my business, and looking back, I should have quit my full-time job sooner, because it would have let me grow my business much faster.  It’s not something I could have known beforehand, though, so it’s an important lesson I learned that’s worth sharing.

I also added a few new tools to my business that were (and continue to be) extremely valuable.  First, I finally bought a thermal label printer.  Up until this point, I had always printed my labels on regular 8” x 11” paper and taped them to boxes.  I didn’t realize how time-consuming this was until I printed my first thermal label, peeled it off its backing, and stuck it to the box.  It cut down my per-box labeling time by 80% at least!  It seems like an obvious improvement to make now, but it took receiving so much more product to show me how much of a time-saver this one change would be.

I also started working smarter by using a software tool called Keepa.  This is a tool that allows you to lookup any product selling on Amazon to review its price history, sales rank history, and how many other people are selling it.

The really valuable info Keepa provides is the sales rank history, which is like looking at the history of a product’s demand over time.  Seeing this history, you can tell if a product that has a good rank today is actually a good seller, or if it’s just experiencing a temporary boost.  Keepa showed me products I otherwise wouldn’t have bought, and has also helped me avoid products that were long-term losers.  It also helped me buy quantities that matched the actual sales rate for that product.  For example, if a product was selling 10 units a month, I would buy no more than 60 units (a six-month supply) to avoid Amazon’s long-term storage fees.  Since I was selling so many more products now, being able to match quantities to demand using real data was (and still is) very valuable.

(For a full explanation of how I use Keepa for my business, see this post).

With the extra time I had, I also tried a few experiments.  First, I bought a Shopify store, which tied into my Amazon business because the products sold both on Amazon and on the Shopify site.  I was looking for a way to diversify my sales, and I also just wanted to see what Shopify was all about.  It didn’t turn out to be successful for me, but I also didn’t spend much time on it.  For me, trying to sell using Shopify has made me appreciate selling on Amazon that much more.

My other experiment in 2019 was in purchasing two other existing Amazon FBA businesses.  One of these was on the verge of failure, and the other was already selling well.  These have both been successful experiments for me, and I’ve learned several key things from selling my own products:

1. You have to be smart about advertising on Amazon to avoid ineffective, costly ad campaigns
2. Compared to wholesale products, competition in selling your own products is much less
3. A high review count is important in driving sales, but takes a lot of time to get
4. Purchasing a successful Amazon FBA business comes with a high up-front cost, but pays off over time if you manage it well

Finally, I achieved my 2019 goal of exceeding $1,000,000 in sales.  This is another milestone which, if you had told me when I started in 2015 that this could be possible, I would have never believed it.  A lot had to go right not just in 2019, but in all the years prior, to make this possible.  I’m truly grateful for the success I’ve achieved, and the personal and financial freedom it’s afforded me.

2019 Product Success Highlights:

2019 Stats:

2019 Inventory Source Breakdown:

Retail Arbitrage	Wholesale	Private Label
0%	97%	3%

2020: The Year I Hired My First Employee

The big story of 2020 for my business was my first employee.  Since I started my business in 2015, I had been proudly doing everything myself as a “one-man show”.  However, my days were getting longer and longer trying to keep up with all the tasks an Amazon business requires.  Specifically, receiving, packing/prepping, and shipping were becoming huge time commitments for me, and I knew I needed help.

I hired someone to help me part-time starting in the fall, which gave me enough time to train them to be ready to ship product to fulfillment centers in preparation for the holiday season.

At first, since I had never hired someone for my business, I wasn’t sure what their exact role would look like.  After several weeks of training, though, they were able to almost fully take over all the packing, prepping, and shipping duties of my business!

This was huge for me, because it freed me up to concentrate on purchasing, finding new suppliers, and other business-growing activities I didn’t have the time for previously.  Just as other time-saving tools or processes had been a great investment in the past, hiring my first employee was hugely helpful for me and my business.

I had a few other noteworthy things happen in 2020 as well.

Early in the year, I entered into a business arrangement that allowed me to sell products without having to invest the time handling the product itself.  I purchase product from a supplier, have it sent to my business associate, and they sell the product for me!

This started as an experiment to see if it was something that would work long-term, but it worked so well in 2020, that I’ve expanded the amount of product I commit to my associate, and plan to continue expanding this channel in the future.

Also, my experiment in purchasing other FBA businesses continued to be successful in 2020.  I bought two more FBA businesses that year, and since they have been a great way to grow my own business, I plan to buy more as time and cash flow allow in 2021 and beyond.

Acquiring and selling already-successful products, without having to invest the time researching an idea and spending money on advertising to build up reviews, has been a great way to grow my business.  Most importantly, it’s allowed me to grow my business without consuming more of my time.  It’s another example of a time-saving investment that’s paid off more than I expected.

Lastly, I applied for, and got, my first trademark for one of my own branded products.  This was an interesting process, because I did it with the help of an attorney, and also because of how long it took to get.  I applied for it in March, and didn’t get the trademark until October!

Since getting a trademark protects your product on Amazon, I highly recommend doing this if you want to establish, and grow, your own brand or product(s) on Amazon.

2020 Product Success Highlights:

• Books (all titles): 64,000+ units sold
• Non-book wholesale products: 20,000+ units sold
• My own products (private label): 2,000+ units sold

2020 Stats:

• Total Sales:  $1,507,184
• Total Purchases: $501,782
• Miles Traveled: 656

2020 Inventory Source Breakdown:

Retail Arbitrage	Wholesale	Private Label
0%	92%	8%

2021: The Year The Year I Cut Out the Middleman

In 2021, one of the most impactful things for my business was the further training of my employee.  He learned how to add new products to my inventory, how to accurately price those products, and create labels and shipments to send those products to Amazon.

In fact, he got so self-sufficient, that I didn’t even need to be present for products to continue coming in and going out.  I even left for a week of vacation, and he kept receiving new products from my distributors and continued sending them to Amazon!

Before 2020, I never realized how impactful having an employee would be, but with the time savings from not having to do prepping, packing, and shipping work, it freed me up to focus on growth-oriented business tasks.

Also, with Amazon raising the prices of their prep fees in 2022, specifically for labeling, poly-bagging, and bubble-wrapping, having an in-house employee do those tasks has saved me a lot of money I otherwise would have had to pay to Amazon.

Another success in 2021 was the discovery of a great liquidation product source.  I’ve mentioned buying from liquidation stores before, but the source I’m talking about is a supplier to those liquidation stores.  I found a way to cut out the middleman!

The products I bought from the liquidation supplier added at least $150k to my overall sales for 2021, so finding this new source was a major win for me.  Since liquidation products are almost always one-time-only purchases, having capitalized on this many products this way was a fantastic achievement. 

It’s worth mentioning I owe my ability of effectively buying liquidation products to the years spent in the aisles of the liquidation stores I use to visit for retail arbitrage.  I know some people look down on retail arbitrage product sourcing, but it’s been a major component in the success of my Amazon business, and I plan on utilizing liquidation sourcing as long as I can.

Another first for me, with the pandemic disrupting overseas shipping from China, was my decision to try locally sourcing a new product in 2021.  I looked around for something located in my home state, attending a local trade show virtually, and found a blacksmith located just a few miles from my home!

I reached out not knowing what to expect, but after some initial discussions, we decided I would sell products on Amazon that he already made.  I created brand new listings specifically for these products, and after a few months of accruing reviews, I could call the experiment a success.  It was so successful, in fact, that I knew I would expand my relationship with him in the future.

I also had my first major challenge in 2021 with one of my private label products.  The product is a baby accessory, and the product that it was an accessory for was recalled!

This was unfortunate, because I had just ordered a fresh supply from my manufacturer a few months earlier, so I spent a lot of money on something I could no longer sell.

On the positive side, my accessory product could be redesigned into a similar accessory with no recall concerns.  After discussions with my manufacturer, I ordered a replacement order of the redesigned accessory, modified my Amazon listings, and restarted with a redesigned product.

Despite the challenge with this product in 2021, I still managed 27% sales growth compared to 2020, which was impressive considering I had over $1.5 million in sales in 2020!

2021 Product Success Highlights:

Books (all titles):  74,000+ units sold

Non-book wholesale products:  38,000+ units sold

My own products (private label):  8,000+ units sold (4 times higher than 2020)

2021 Stats:

Total Sales:  $1,923,901

Total Purchases:  $697,055

Miles Traveled: 253

2021 Inventory Source Breakdown:

Retail Arbitrage	Wholesale	Private Label
0%	93%	7%

2022: The Year My Business Didn’t Grow

Unlike all the previous years I’ve sold on Amazon, 2022 was the first year where my sales were down compared to the previous year’s.  While my 2022 sales weren’t terribly below 2021 (about 4% lower), as a responsible business owner it’s important to understand why my sales went down.  That way, if there was something I did wrong in 2022, or something I did right in 2021, I could make any necessary changes going forward.

When I examined in detail what I sold in 2021, I found something interesting.  In the first quarter of 2021, I made some very lucky purchases from the liquidation supplier I talked about in my 2021 summary above.  Being that these were liquidation purchases, they were non-repeatable, so it makes sense why I couldn’t have replicated them in 2022.  Another way to look at this was if I hadn’t made these lucky buys, my sales would have been significantly lower in 2021, and therefore lower than my sales in 2022.

On a more positive note, I launched 6 new products in 2022, with a focus on speeding up the time from product idea to product success or failure, while also minimizing up-front costs in case the product didn’t work out.  I call this approach “failing fast, failing cheap”, which is how I minimize the risks of launching new products.

Those 6 products combined sold 985 units total, generating just over $15,000 in sales in 2022.  Considering these were “experimental” product launches in the sense that I didn’t know how well they would perform, I’m happy with the outcome.  More importantly, it’s given me the confidence to continue creating new products in the future.

Compiling the statistics for the 6 products above inspired me to generate performance stats for all my branded products in 2022.  Here is a breakdown:

• Number of brands owned: 11
• Number of brands bought from other sellers: 9
• Number of brands I created: 2
• Number of products actively sold under all brands: 53
• Number of registered trademarks: 4
• Sales generated by my brands in 2022: $110,610

The sales from my own branded products are only a small percentage of my overall sales, around 6% in 2022.  This number shows I’m still mostly a reseller of other people’s products, and it’s an approach that continues to work well for me.

When I think about 2022 versus previous years, 2022 was all about perseverance.  While my business didn’t grow from a sales perspective compared to the previous year, I did have success with creating my own products, supported by the continued success of buying and reselling wholesale products.

2022 Product Success Highlights:

Books (all titles):  70,000+ units sold

Non-book wholesale products:  42,000+ units sold

My own products (private label):  7,300+ units sold

2022 Stats:

Total Sales:  $1,846,044

Total Purchases:  $699,656

Miles Traveled: 253

2022 Inventory Source Breakdown:

Retail Arbitrage	Wholesale	Private Label
0%	94%	6%

2023: The Year of ???

Unlike the previous years I’ve written about, 2023 is still happening as I’m writing this post.  I can’t say yet what 2023 will be the year of for me and my business, but there are a couple of interesting things worth talking about.

The availability of products from liquidators is still below where it was in 2021, which has led me to focus on the stability of my product sources.  I’ve been researching new wholesale sources, and I’ve been investigating ways to domestically source new private label products.

Also, given the success I had creating new products in 2022, I plan on launching several new products in 2023, hopefully at least a dozen.  It’s an ambitious goal, but the success I had in 2022 showed me I should continue creating new products as part of my overall business growth strategy.

After describing these two things, maybe 2023 will be the year I create a killer new product?  Or, maybe something else will come up in the next few months that will be even better?  One of the best things about having your own business is that you can pursue whatever path you like, and as long as you’re smart about it, it usually works out in your favor.

Final Thoughts

I want to wrap up this post with a few final ideas as I reflect on my Amazon FBA journey so far:

• It’s not too late to join the ecommerce party; it’s still early, and the pandemic has given ecommerce a boost that won’t wear off any time soon

I think some people are hesitant to try an ecommerce business because they think all the good ideas have been tried, or that Amazon may be saturated.  I can say with certainty that there is still opportunity in ecommerce, and that I know it’s possible for someone to start today and be successful.

• The freedom of not having a job is worth the slow going and long hours early on

Of all the things I could say about how great it is having my own FBA business, the most important, by far, is the freedom it’s given me.  I set my own schedule, I determine what’s important to work on and what isn’t, and no one ever tells me what to do.  It’s such an understatement to say the time and effort I invested during the early years was worth the freedom I’ve gained.  Imagine not having a boss, not having a commute, not having to get up early to go to a job you don’t like.  Isn’t freedom from those things worth the effort?

• I should have bought time-saving devices and adopted time-saving methods sooner

This is worth mentioning because of how simple, yet powerful, of an idea it is.  Every time I’ve bought a time-saving device, or changed a business process to save time, it’s been worth it.  The benefits of saving time compound by freeing you up to focus on more valuable activities for your business, which in turns grows your business.  Finding ways to save time will be a major focus of mine for the foreseeable future.

• The only thing I would change is I wish I would have started sooner

I want to conclude with this thought, because it sums up my feelings about selling on Amazon.  If I had started my business sooner, I would have been able to quit my job sooner, and in turn enjoyed all the benefits that freedom has afforded me.  The freedom to live how I want, versus how someone else dictates, has been the defining motivator for me in starting, and growing, my business.

*Note: I’ve updated this post twice, in August of 2021, and in June of 2022, since my initial writing in September of 2020.

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